If you’re looking for a pick-me-up on this Monday, you can’t do much better than The Goonies cast reunion currently being hosted by Josh Gad. Like millions of us old enough to have come of age in the 80s, Gad is a big-time Goonies fan, and he’s done us all a solid by getting the original cast members together for an epic reunion on his YouTube page. They may look a little different, but it’s wonderful having the cast for director Richard Donner’s iconic 1985 film back together. We’ve got Mikey (Sean Astin), big brother Brand (Josh Brolin), Andy (Kerri Green), Mouth (Corey Feldman), Data (Ke Huy Quan), Stef (Martha Plimpton) and Chunk (Jeff Cohen) mixing it up with Gad. This reunion supports The Center for Disaster Philanthropy, which helps support all COVID-19 responders and those affected by the pandemic.
Here’s how Gad described the event on his Instagram Page:
Featured image: From left to right, Corey Feldman, Martha Plimpton, Josh Brolin, Kerri Green and Sean Astin in a cave in a scene from the film ‘Goonies’, 1985. (Photo by Warner Brothers/Getty Images)
Here’s more of our coverage on how COVID-19 is affecting the entertainment industry, and how the entertainment industry is trying to do their part to help:
At long last, the entire, 9-film Skywalker Saga will be available for streaming all in one place. Disney+ has announced the release date of The Complete Skywalker Saga on that very special Star Wars holiday May the 4th. The 9th and final film in the saga, J.J. Abrams Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalkeris streaming a whole two months earlier, giving fans the complete saga while we’re all maintaining social distancing at home. The Complete Skywalker Saga joins Disney+’s The Mandalorian, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and the new 8-part docuseries Disney Gallery: The Mandalorianin the streaming service’s vast Star Wars collection.
The Complete Skywalker Saga includes a ton of great extras for Star Wars nerds. For example, for the film that started it all, George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars IV – A New Hope, Disney+ has a rough cut from the Mos Eisley cantina scene that is a must-watch. There are a bunch of glorious goodies like this for all 9 films.
Disney+ also announced a week-long Star Wars concept art takeover, with artwork from each film appearing on the streaming service, including the original concept paintings. These pieces of Star Wars art will include work from legends in the field like Ralph McQuarrie and Doug Chiang.
Check out the trailer announcement here:
Here’s the official word from Disney:
Long have we waited. And now, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is coming to Disney+ on Star Wars Day.
The final chapter of the Skywalker saga, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, will begin streaming two months early on Disney+ in honor of May the 4th, also known as Star Wars Day. For the first time ever, fans will be able to stream the complete Skywalker saga all in one place — perfect for Star Wars Day marathons. What began in 1977 with George Lucas’ groundbreaking Star Wars: A New Hope, the nine-part saga is available within Disney+’s extensive collection of Star Wars movies and series including The Mandalorian and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Lucasfilm and director J.J. Abrams joined forces once again to deliver Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the thrilling climactic chapter in the Skywalker saga, bringing the heroic struggle to restore peace and freedom to the galaxy to an epic, resounding conclusion.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker joins Disney+’s May the 4th line-up including the premiere of the eight-episode documentary series Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, and the series finale of the award-winning animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
In addition to new content offerings, Disney+ will also honor the artistry of Star Wars with a week-long concept art takeover on the service. Like a commemorative gallery, each film and series’ artwork will be updated on May 4th to feature its original concept paintings. From Star Wars: A New Hope to The Mandalorian, the updated art will feature work from celebrated artists such as the legendary Ralph McQuarrie and Academy Award-winning artist, author, and production designer, Doug Chiang. On the Disney+ home screen, the animated Star Wars brand tile, viewable on web and connected TV devices, gets upgraded with a new animation that honors the signature hyperspace jump.
Featured image: Daisy Ridley is Rey and Adam Driver is Kylo Ren in STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. Courtesy Lucasfilm/Walt Disney Studios
Makeup artist Matteo Silvi is used to traveling the world on film assignments. For example, his recent work with actor Chris Hemsworth on Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame and Men in Black: International took Silvi to England, Scotland, Morocco, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia.
Extraction, which debuted this past Friday, April 24, is no different. The high-octane actioner starring Hemsworth as Tyler Rake, a hard-nosed mercenary hired to rescue a crime lord’s son kidnapped by the Bangladesh mafia, filmed in India and Thailand. As the makeup department head, Silvi oversaw everything from designing Hemsworth’s badass look to creating the blood, scars, and broken body parts left in Rake’s wake during the rescue mission.
But recently, the coronavirus has kept the Italian-born Silvi on lockdown. For the past month, he, his wife and daughter have been confined to their Rome apartment. Silvi was in Lyon, France designing the makeup for Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel when word came and he traveled back home by car. That’s where we caught up with him to talk about Extraction’s makeup challenges.
“We were so excited to do this job because there was so much action,” says Silvi. “We went through liters and liters of blood. We shot a sequence on the bridge with fighting and explosions, cars on fire everywhere. It was like a war.”
Chris Hemsworth in EXTRACTION. Photo by Jasin Boland/Netflix.
Extraction marks the directing debut of stunt coordinator Sam Hargrave, who worked from a script by Joe Russo. Silvi, who knew Hargrave from the Avenger films, explained that for the fight sequences, Hargrave shot short video guides in advance to map out the action.
“It was very helpful to watch these films to see the back and forth as Chris goes through the many fighting beats,” continues Silvi. “We knew what was going to happen. We could tell how bad it was going to get, where he was going to get hit and where he had to be bruised. We saw that we’d have to have some continuity details like dried blood from the previous action sequence.”
Silvi particularly cites a twenty-minute segment of nonstop action as an example of Hargrave’s split-second timing. “It looks like there are no cuts in it. It’s really impressive,” says Silvi. “The stunt action in this movie is something that I’ve never seen before.”
Silvi’s main responsibility was creating the look for Hemsworth’s stone-cold killer. Hargrave wanted a weathered, world-weary look to show the toll the years had taken on the former military specialist turned gun for hire.
“He doesn’t have to look so handsome,” Silvi remembers Hargrave telling him. But that proved to be easier said than done. “We added dirt and blood and scars and Chris still looked amazing. He was better looking like that.”
Silvi opted for three scars on Hemsworth’s face — one across his nose and two on the side of his head.For a scene that called for Rake to remove his shirt, Silvi scattered 25 more scars around his torso. “The scars changed him a lot,” observes Silvi. “It definitely made him look more rough and tough.”
Hairstylist Luca Vanella working on Chris Hemsworth on the set of ‘Extraction.’ Courtesy Netflix.
Next came tattoos. Rake sports an extensive tattoo on his neck that can be seen throughout the movie. Silvi estimates 10 or 11 more were added on Hemsworth’s back, arms and chest for the shirtless scene. Silvi came up with the original images, calling on Rome-based graphic artist Virginia Lorenzetti to collaborate on the drawings and designs. Hemsworth also weighed in on the selections.
“I would show him ideas and he would say which ones he liked and which ones he didn’t. Working from that, I started designing,” says Silvi, adding Hemsworth is often involved in the makeup process. “Chris likes to join in the conversation. It was really fun to create this character with him.”
Director Sam Hargrave and Chris Hemsworth on the set of ‘Extraction.’ Photo by Jasin Boland/Netflix.
A tattoo on Hemsworth’s chest plays a key role in Rake’s backstory. “We tried to find an image that was reminiscent of the character’s son,” continues Silvi. “He was a father who lost his son when he was six years old. So there’s a tattoo on his chest to remind him.”
Tiberio Nardi assisted Silvi with Hemsworth’s makeup which took about an hour each day to apply.
Luca Vannella, Extraction’s hair department head, has known Silvi since they met on a movie set when they were fifteen. Silvi’s father was doing makeup and Vannella’s father, hair. Following in their respective parent’s footsteps, they’ve worked on and off together throughout their careers. Lately, it’s been more on as Vannella is Hemsworth’s hair guy of choice. (He created the iconic Thor locks for all of Hemsworth’s superhero appearances and did Hemsworth’s hair on Blackhat, Bad Times at the El Royale and Men in Black: International.)
Hemsworth was convinced that Rake’s look pivoted on the hairstyle. At one point, the actor considered shaving his head completely. After several discussions, Vannella ultimately cut it short on the sides and left it long on top so that it would flow down the front of his head.
“I think that bit of length on top was better,” Silvi adds. “It was a really cool look. Chris was very happy with the haircut.”
Vannella was also instrumental in creating the look for the only featured female in the cast. Iranian actress Goldshifteh Farahani plays Nik Khan, a distaff version of Rake who enlists him to take on the rescue mission. “We decided to give her a really smart and beautiful look,” says Silvi.
Luca Vanella doing the hair for Golshifteh Farahani. Courtesy of Netflix.
Silvi brought in Mad Max: Fury Road Oscar-winner Damian Martin to create the prosthetics. For a scene where Rake digs a bullet out of his arm, Martin replicated Hemsworth’s upper limb and fitted it with a blood rig. “We put Chris in a certain position with the prosthetic arm in his shirt so you can really see him digging in the knife and digging the bullet out,” says Silvi. “As he was doing the action, the blood was coming out of the wound. It is pretty impressive.”
Cool makeup abounds. Artist Daniele Nastasi fitted Farhad, a Bangladesh bad guy played by Suraj Rikame, with a scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to the side of his ear. Key Dan Lawson Johnston oversaw the complicated makeup for Saju (Randeep Hooda), an adversary who ends up with a broken nose, swollen eye, and broken cheekbone after a knockdown fight with Rake. “That was a two-hour makeup every day,” explains Silvi. “He had a prosthetic nose, prosthetic cheek, prosthetic eyelid. It was a pretty big challenge. He was in a lot.”
Randeep Hooda in ‘Extraction.’ Courtesy Netflix.
But by far, Silvi’s favorite gag involved a prosthetic head hit by a bullet at close range. (We’ve been sworn to secrecy regarding who takes the hit). “We literally exploded the head,” says Silvi. “It was filled with blood and brain material. They put a bit of explosive inside and blew it up!”
Upping the degree of difficulty was the extreme humidity and temperatures which averaged around 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) during the Thailand shoot. Hooda’s prosthetic-heavy makeup was the most difficult to maintain. But all the characters needed extra attention to keep their applications from sweating off during filming.
Like everyone, Silvi is waiting for the quarantine to be lifted. Things have taken an optimistic turn in Italy as the rate of daily confirmed cases recedes. Silvi has his fingers crossed that the lockdown will ease up by May. And then, with luck, they’ll be able to resume production on The Last Duel.
“We shot half the movie and because of the virus, we had to go home,” says Silvi about the film that stars Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Jodie Comer. “It’s a very important movie for my career. I really hope to be able to finish it.”
If you’re searching for an edge-of-your-seat movie experience to escape the current COVID-19 reality for a couple of hours, look no further than Extraction, streaming on Netflix beginning April 24. The film stars Chris Hemsworth as Tyler Rake, a fearless mercenary who is called upon to rescue the kidnapped son of an incarcerated crime lord. The seemingly straightforward mission becomes complicated when Rake develops compassion for the kid and is intent on protecting him at all costs.
Director Sam Hargrave describes Extraction as a story of redemption through sacrifice. While the film marks Hargrave’s directorial debut, it is far from his first foray into high-action, high-adventure filmmaking. His work as an award-winning stuntman and stunt coordinator is on full display in a number of box-office megahits, including both Captain America films, The Wolverine, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. For the latter two, he also directed second units.
L-r: Chris Hemsworth and Sam Hargarve on the set of ‘Extraction.’ Courtesy Jasin Boland/Netflix.
Extraction unites Hargrave with Marvel Cinematic Universe directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who on this ride are producers; Joe also wrote the script. The film necessitated upward of eight months of pre-production for Hargrave and shot in such faraway cities as Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Bangkok, and Phuket. It required him to flex his acting muscles as well in a role that, although small, proved just as taxing as sitting in the director’s chair.
“It was the most stressful, difficult time that I had ever been through because you’re trying to not only perform and remember your lines but then also you’re setting up the shot and you’ve gotta look at playback,” he says.
The Credits chatted with Hargrave about taking the helm, filming abroad, and finishing the film just before the pandemic hit. Edited interview excerpts follow.
How has life been for you during this crazy time in our world? Were you putting the finishing touches on Extraction or had you completed it before the pandemic?
First off, this is a crazy time for everyone and new territory for all of us that we’re trying to navigate as best we can. For the movie, it kind of hit right when we were finishing up our visual-effects reviews and the final visual-effects shots. It did limit the number of people who could be in the room at one time, so it was just me, the visual-effects supervisor, and the colorist. Fortunately, it was down to within days of finalizing that when the official lockdown happened and all nonessential businesses were shut down. What it did impact was our planned press tour across the world. We were going to be going to India and Spain and South America and Australia, and so that was put on hold and now all of those in-person press interviews and whatnot are now being conducted via Zoom.
You’ve directed second units, most notably on the final two Avengers films, but Extraction marks your feature-directing debut. Why was it time for you to take the helm?
Well, I’ve been directing second units for a number of years starting with The Accountant in 2014 and just building up my skills and relationships. What made this the right movie? It’s one of those things where if you’re ever really ready, you’ve waited too long. There’s never a perfect time to take the leap, and so this opportunity came. On Infinity War, I was directing second unit and talking with Joe and Anthony and they knew of my aspirations to direct. Joe came to me and said, “Hey, I think I have a script that could be a very good opportunity for your first movie,” and I was thrilled. I loved the primal nature of the main character and how it’s a redemption story. It’s not just an action movie, it’s an action movie with a heart and we really wanted to focus on that. I was at times truthfully apprehensive, because once Netflix signed on and talked about the numbers, I was like, man, for a first-time director that’s kind of big. You could fall flat. But then I had some great support and mentors.
Extraction was shot overseas, and the cast includes mostly foreign actors. What were the main challenges with filming and casting abroad?
Filming on these locations, it was fantastic and challenging at the same time. The credits run long because instead of one union person that you would have in the States, there are just more people involved in the process, so you have more people in the camera department, more people in the security department. One day we fed 700 people on set. When we were doing these big chase sequences, we had over 200 security personnel locking down the streets so that everyone was safe. So the challenges are there, but then also the passion is there and everyone was on board and really excited to work on this movie.
But the casting of it, I’ve seen some Bollywood movies but I’m not extremely well versed, so I didn’t know all of the talent that was out there. We had some auditions and had some really great people that the casting directors put in front of us. We tried to pick people that had both a following in India, but also had a Western sensibility to their acting style.
Chris Hemsworth and Randeep Hooda in EXTRACTION. Photo by Jasin Boland/Netflix.
You shot a lot of the fight scenes yourself with a handheld camera. What was involved in choreographing these scenes to create the action while keeping you out of the action and safe?
I would grab the camera during most action sequences. The day I hired our DP, Tom Sigel, I said, “Hey, just upfront, just letting you know there will be times that it will be easier for me to just take the camera myself and shoot what I see in my head than it would be to describe to you what I need and do multiple things. The one long sequence where I operated the camera the most was something we called the “oner,” and my reasoning for doing that was because of my stunt background and some of the places and ways I wanted to capture the action. I wanted to put the audience in the seat of a car with the driver, be there right next to Chris as he fights, jump with him from building to building, because I wanted it to be as if an audience member was doing this extraction with Chris Hemsworth in real-time. So to do that, I wanted to put the camera in some very precarious situations. There were numerous close calls that I felt more comfortable putting myself in that position. And then the other side of it is, there’s no one to blame when you’re operating the camera and you get this sequence. It is exactly what you want people to see.
You’ve worked with the Russo Brothers on Marvel films as a stunt coordinator. What was it like to do so as a director? Was it odd at first or did it just feel natural?
It was a natural progression for our relationship. They’re very open to other ideas from other collaborators and filmmakers. I try to emulate that side of them. But it is a very interesting position to be in when you’re directing a movie for the person who wrote the movie who’s also a director. Joe wrote the movie almost a decade ago, so he’s probably seen that movie, not only in his head while he wrote it, but then probably trying to make it. So it’s an amazing testament to how giving and respectful he is to hand over the reins on something that I know he has a vision for. He trusted me to bring that to life. There were definitely moments of tough love, I had some interesting conversations on the phone with him, but he was always supportive in what was best for the movie and I will always be thankful for that.
What experience do you want audiences to have in watching Extraction?
If people can be transported out of their own reality and go on a ride that is entertaining, and yet they can relate to and have an emotional response to it, then the movie will be a success to me. Then I will be a very happy filmmaker.
Featured image: Behind-the-scenes of ‘Extraction,’ starring Chris Hemsworth. Photo by Jasin Boland/Netflix.
Let’s be honest. World Intellectual Property Day (which is this Sunday, April 26) doesn’t immediately stir up the same – uh – partying frisson as Saint Paddy’s day, in terms of breaking out the frothy malt beverages, busting out in green clothes, and for some, making dubious claims of birthright attachment to the Emerald Isle. It’s hard to think of this particular observational day as an excuse to party on with our IPR rights-owning bad selves till it’s 1999 (assuming we’re not IPR-lifting from our beloved Prince to even say that). Of course, it needs to be said, this is all notwithstanding the new-normal obvious: that any kind of close quarter interpersonal celebration is rightfully verboten anyway.
But if we think about it – and at the MPA, we certainly do – maybe we should be celebrating IPR day with more appreciative gusto. After all, to borrow a handy-dandy laundry list from the Copyright Alliance, we are talking about authors, photographers, performers, artists, software developers, musicians, journalists, directors, songwriters, game designers and many other individual creators.
Which, I am guessing, represents at least as many people as our great and beloved friends from Ireland and those looking up from their cups and claiming to be Irish on Saint Paddy’s day.
As we continue to languish in lockdown, one way that we might appreciate the significance of the occasion would be to watch Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and more specifically, one climactic scene that encapsulates a young creator’s plucky insistence to hold on to what is rightly hers.
There is more reason than a single scene to see Little Women, by the way. Gerwig’s film goes one-deeper than straight-ahead adaptation. It’s a vibrant dialogue with Louisa May Alcott herself, the author of the original novel, whose career-long aspiration to express, explore, and answer her own artistic questions and impulses, were consistently hampered and compromised by patriarchal norms. Gerwig fuses Alcott’s character with that of Jo March – our young creator, played by Saoirse Ronan – and makes this a movie about someone writing a book called Little Women. By doing so, Gerwig opens a channel, not only between Alcott and her fictional alter-ego but with all women and other minority voices working to have equitable treatment as creators.
Thus, before we go on, Dear Reader, this is where we must fulfill our consumer advisory responsibilities and inform you that scene spoilers are necessarily a part of this piece. So could all aspiring viewers of the movie not wanting to read any kind of heads-up about plot, please raise their fluttery fans to their eyes or simply avert their glances?
The movie opens with a quote from Alcott: “I had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales.” It proves to be a prescient harbinger of Jo March’s forthcoming struggles as a woman and an artist, particularly when she offers a publisher the manuscript for her new novel.
It’s great fun to hear the argument whipping forth between Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts) and Jo, played with earnest, vulnerable conviction by Saoirse Ronan, with Alcott hovering in the ether like Obi May Kenobe.
If the central character of Jo’s novel ends up a spinster, argues Dashwood, no one will buy it.
“The right ending,” he says with some battle-worn authority, “is the one that sells.”
“I suppose marriage has always been an economic proposition,” says Jo. “Even in fiction.”
Reluctantly, she agrees, however. Her story is amended to a jollier tale, you might say.
And now – as the voice always says at the beginning of an HBO show – comes the big moment: the contract. As if that plot compromise were not enough, Dashwood tells Jo that he’s prepared to give her five percent of the royalties. It’s worth reading the transcript of what follows.
“So I get five percent of the profit?” Asks Jo.
“Five percent of the net profits,” says Dashwood. “After I recoup.”
“Well, what about payment up front?”
“I’m the one taking the risk in printing this book.”
“Yes, but it’s my book.”
“If it does well, we’ll both make money. If not, I can stay in business.”
“So I get nothing if it fails.”
“No, I’ll give you 500 dollars right now to buy out the copyright.”
Warning, warning, says the empowered Tinkerbell.
“Copyright?” asks Jo.
“That’s the right for reprinting, that sort of thing. Sequels. Characters for other stories.”
“Hmm, might that be worth something.”
“Well, only if it’s a success.”
“I see. It seems like something I would want to own, no?”
“Didn’t you say your family needed the money more immediately?”
“Yes, they do, which is why I want an upfront payment.”
“No, it’s too risky. I’ll only pay for the copyright.”
Jo reflects for a long pause and then she says “You keep your 500 dollars and I’ll keep the copyright. Also, I want 10 percent of royalties.”
“5.5 percent,” he counter-offers. “That’s very generous.”
“Nine percent.”
“Six percent and that’s it.”
“Mr. Dashwood, if I’m going to sell my heroine into marriage for money, I might as well get some of it.”
“6.6 percent.”
“Done.”
Mr. Dashwood is not finished yet. “And you don’t need to decide about the copyright right now.”
“No I’ve decided,” says our creator. “I want to own my own book.”
And there you have it, she wins the right to own her jolly little tale, in a scene that had some similarities to Alcott’s selfsame transactions. As we mark World Intellectual Property Day, Jo’s triumph is an evocative way to appreciate copyright as a bedrock principle, not only economically (the core copyright industries in the US alone add more than $1.2 trillion to the national economy and support more than 5.5 million direct jobs) but as encouragement for all voices to be heard. As Greta Gerwig wrote about making this film: “It matters what we write. It matters what we make films about. I can, because Louisa May Alcott did.”
Featured image: Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Emma Watson in Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN. Photo by Wilson Webb. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Today we’re hosting our first-ever virtual event, called Film School Friday, in what we hope will become an ongoing series. For film and TV lovers who enjoy knowing how their favorite movies and shows are made, Film School Friday will function a bit like The Credits does. We’ll be interviewing the folks who make the movies we watch and the series we binge, only we’ll be doing so via video conference and online panel, giving you a front-row seat. While we had this idea quite a bit ago, it has never seemed more relevant or necessary than now, when so many of us are in our homes and apartments, day after day (after day, after day).
Our first event is hosted by John Gibson, the Motion Picture Association’s Vice President for External and Multicultural Affairs. Our kickoff panel includes creators of some of the year’s biggest series. We’ve got Stacy Osei-Kuffour, a writer on HBO’s stellar Watchmen. We’ve got composer Brandon Campbell, whose work you’ve heard on a little show called Game of Thrones. There’s Tamlyn Tomita, whose successful acting career includes her recent role as Commodore Oh on the critically acclaimed Star Trek: Picard. And finally, cinematographer Andrew Strahorn joins us, who has shot some of television’s most intense dramas, including Fear the Walking Dead.
This being our first-ever virtual event, we’ve had to smooth out a few wrinkles. Technical difficulties with the video feed of our pre-recorded panel gave us our first real test. Yet what the panelists had to say came through clearly, and their insight on building careers in the entertainment industry is just as valuable in podcast form, which is what we’ve turned our kick-off event into.
We are all experts in making the most of the situation at hand at this point, so we hope you enjoy our first Film School Friday, podcast edition. There will be more to come.
Disney+ has revealed the first glimpse at their 8-part docuseries Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, and it looks pretty fantastic. “So much of this process is about problem-solving and making breakthroughs,” says Bryce Dallas Howard, one of The Mandalorian‘s many talented directors. As the first-ever live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian had a lot of expectations, and astonishingly, the show met them. It helped that creator Jon Favreau tapped Howard and a slew of other super talented folks to help helm the episodes, including Oscar-winner Taika Waititi.
There’s an amazing moment in the trailer in which one of those people, director Deborah Chow, discusses how legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog did a bit of impromptu directing while he acted in the series. Herzog played The Client, the man who hires the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) to track down a highly sought after asset. We all now know that the asset in question was Baby Yoda. During filming, Herzog actually fell back on his directing chops, getting cast and crew to feel the magic inspired by the Baby Yoda puppet.
There are quite a few juicy tidbits revealed in this two-minute sneak peek. How about this background information about the series’ beloved droid IG-11 (voiced by Waititi), who was based on IG-88, the bounty hunter droid briefly featured in The Empire Strikes Back. The Mandalorian director Dave Filoni reveals that the original IG-88 was built out of old parts from the Mos Eisley cantina set from A New Hope. He’s in Empire for all of a minute, yet that didn’t stop The Mandalorian team from using him to inspire one of the series most important characters. IG-11, the bounty hunter droid we meet in The Mandalorian, is the same model, only he has a much larger role to play in the series.
Check out the trailer here. Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian will stream on Disney+ on May 4, 2020—which happens to be a special holiday for Star Wars fans.
Here’s the official synopsis:
On May the 4th, get a closer look at the groundbreaking technology at work behind the scenes of The Mandalorian and more when Disney+ pulls back the curtain on the live-action Star Wars series with Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian.
The eight-episode docuseries, hosted by creator and executive producer Jon Favreau, promises insightful commentary from actors including Pedro Pascal and Gina Carano, anecdotes from the directors who helmed episodes in the first season, and an exploration into what it means to be a part of telling stories in the Star Wars galaxy and honoring George Lucas’s legacy. Today we got our first look at the debut trailer for the series, which will premiere on Disney+ on May the 4th, also known as Star Wars Day.
For more Star Wars news, check out this story about how Russian Doll co-creator Leslye Headland is creating a female-centered Star Wars series—featuring martial arts elements!–for Disney+.
Featured image: Pedroa Pascal is ‘The Mandalorian.’ Courtesy Walt Disney Studios/Disney+
There’s a new unscripted show in town, and it wants you to know We’re Here. That’s both the name and the aesthetic of co-creators Johnny Ingram and Stephen Warren’s fabulous, fierce, and fun show featuring renowned drag queens Eureka O’Hara, Shangela Laquifa Wadley, and Bob the Drag Queen. On the series, the Queens drive into towns across America, and recruit local residents representing a wide swath of humanity as ‘drag daughters,’ to participate in a one-night-only drag show. Each makeshift drag troupe braves judgment, faces fears, breaks barriers, and builds bridges along the way. It’s like an even queerer, more in-your-face, flamboyant Queer Eye, and, as they say, we’re here for it.
L-r: Bob the Drag Queen, Shangela Laquifa Wadley, and Eureka OHara. Courtesy of HBOBob the Drag Queen, Shangela Laquifa Wadley, Eureka O’Hara. Photograph by Khun Minn Ohn/HBO
To create music for the six-part series, the filmmakers of We’re Here turned to Icelandic composer Herdís Stefánsdóttir, who scored The Sun is Also a Star and created additional music for The Hate U Give. She focuses on the environments and locales in which each show takes place, and creates emotional arcs of each drag daughter as they go through their personal transformation. She creates a dramatic but appropriate contrast to the musical hit parade utilized at other points in each episode. The Credits spoke to Stefánsdóttir about her work on We’re Here which is a departure from her other projects. Among other things, it is her first time composing for an unscripted show.
How did you become part of We’re Here, and in what way did it challenge you as a composer?
My agent sent a portfolio with my music. Creators Steve Warren and Jonny Ingram loved it, and thankfully, the director Pete LoGreco did too. We had one phone call, and I was hired. It did help that I had watched the first episode, really loved it, and wanted to be a part of it. My experience scoring this show has been very different from scoring fiction or narrative films. A completely different approach. The storytelling in the music has to be on point. It has to be gentle and real. It has to make sure to give space and feel real, in the sense that this is a real-life person opening their heart. The score has to be respectful and genuine. It’s not easy at all to score an unscripted series like this. It’s really a brain puzzle. In that sense, it’s definitely been harder to score than the fiction films I have worked on.
You started making different sounds for each episode, and each person to some degree has its own theme. How did that evolve as you went along?
As I’ve been writing, I gradually started to create a sound world for each character and story, but that didn’t really start until the second episode. Each town is also different and brings out different sounds. To get into the mood, I’ve been listening to music related to the towns, like old music from Louisiana, or music from Navajo indigenous people. But that’s just for fun, to get a vibe. The score doesn’t really draw inspiration from that music. The location, landscape, and the visual environment definitely inspire different sound palettes.
Featured image: Herdís Stefánsdóttir. Photo by Ugla Hauks.
In what specific ways did you allow the music you listened to and the images relating to each location influence the score on particular shows?
I think I have stepped way out of my comfort zone for certain episodes in the show. These are small rural towns, with strong roots in country music. I’ve been exploring instrument combos and music that I have never even thought of writing before. I have always loved bendy and de-tuned sounds, so being able to use the slide guitar for this show has been fun. I really love the sound of the slide. It can also give a sense of a lonely, remote feeling that some of those towns felt like. For the episode that takes place in Farmington, which borders the Navajo desert, I processed a lot of flute. I felt the slightly off-sounding flute fit to the strange desert landscape. For another town, I’m going full-on country, or that’s what I think. But the funny thing is that I barely really know what country music is, so what’s coming out of this is more like country psychedelia, with a twist. I’m making my own version of country-twisted music, and owning it!
D.J. Pierce (Shangela), Caldwell Tidicue (Bob the Drag Queen), David Huggard (Eureka O’Hara). Photograph by Christopher Smith/HBO
How has scoring and composing during the pandemic changed or influenced your work on We’re Here?
I’m still in the middle of scoring the show, currently working on episodes 4 and 5. Because of the situation, I’ve been working a lot with what’s close to me in the studio. I’ve recorded pianos, my voice, organ, celeste, and synths. And for the instruments I don’t play, I’ve done remote sessions with friends, recording instruments like strings, saxophone, and guitars.
It’s a lot of very impulsive decisions, feeling what’s right. Sometimes it comes immediately, and sometimes I have to close my eyes and think. Sometimes I get it right immediately, but sometimes it takes a few attempts, in collaboration with the director. It’s amazing how easy it is, working remotely making music. We’ve really come to an age where anything is possible.
As part of supporting diverse entertainment in the time of COVID-19, HBO is playing the premiere simultaneously on YouTube and HBO tonight, April 23, at 9 pm EST. If you don’t have HBO, you can watch the new show free on YouTube. There’s also a pre-show on HBO at 8:30 EST, featuring the Queens and guests like Drew Barrymore, Naomi Watts, Ellen Pompeo, and Andrew Rannells.
Featured image: Shangela Laquifa Wadley. Photograph by Christopher Smith/HBO
Well we can’t say we saw this one coming. Leslye Headland, the co-creator of Netflix’s Russian Doll, (a brilliant sci-fi comedy on Netflix that we highly recommend if you haven’t already seen it), has successfully pitched a new Star Wars series for Disney+, which she’ll be writing and showrunning. The story was initially broken by Variety, which reports that Headland’s new series, which is already staffing, will be female-centered. Deadlinefleshed out some details on the series, which will be a female-centered action-thriller, with martial arts elements (!!), set in an alternate timeline to the main Star Wars canon. Folks, does this not sound incredible?
For you Russian Doll neophytes, you should know the series’ first season was nominated for 13 Emmy Awards, winning three. Headland directed multiple episodes of the mind-bending comedy, which starred her co-creator and co-producer Natasha Lyonne (who also directed an episode) as Nadia, an ennui-ridden game coder who finds herself— somewhat game-like—repeatedly dying on her 36th birthday. Every time Nadia dies, she resets in front of the same bathroom mirror afterward, left to try and unlock the riddle of why she keeps coming back. The show manages to be funny, freaky, and pleasingly puzzling. Here’s hoping that Lyonne has a role in Headland’s new Star Wars series!
Headland’s mysterious new show will join a bunch of Star Wars series on Disney+. There’s already one proven success story in Jon Favreau smash hit The Mandalorian, which recently wrapped season two, has a third season in the works, and will be the subject of a new Disney+ documentary. There’s also that Rogue One prequel series that will focus on Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor, and, eventually, the Obi-Wan Kenobi standalone series starring Ewan McGregor.
While the majority of the details surrounding Headland’s series are still a secret, it’s heartening news to hear that a brilliant woman will be leading us into new worlds in a galaxy far, far away.
Featured image: Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll. Courtesy of Netflix
However this wacky, gorgeously shot third season of Westworld concludes, we now know that the story will continue. HBO has officially confirmed that the sentient hosts and morally vacuous humans they alternately fight and befriend will be back for a fourth season. The news came via Tweet and press release—rejoice, Westworld fans!
Casey Bloys, president, HBO Programming, said this in the release:
“From the western theme park to the technocratic metropolis of the near future, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed every twist and turn from the minds of master storytellers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. We can’t wait to see where their inspired vision takes us next.”
Westworld currently has two more episodes left in season 3, which has taken the action largely outside of the titular theme park and into the real world. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) has continued her mission to stick it to the human race, and the season’s many plot twists have included (spoiler alert) the fact that she has essentially cloned herself in the forms of faces familiar and new to aid her cause. The biggest twist, arguably, was that Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), killed in season 2 and resurrected as a host, has actually been a version of Dolores this entire season. When Maeve (Thandie Newton) took a sword to the gut from a resurrected Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), he, too, was actually Dolores!
Season three has also been admirably ambitious, and this for a show that has been ambitious from the very start. Taking the action out of the park and delivering a completely different aesthetic—gone are the faux old west saloons, in are the spliced-together cityscapes of Singapore, Valencia, and Los Angeles. There’s also a bunch of new characters played by great actors, including Aaron Paul’s Caleb (on Team Dolores) and Vincent Cassel’s Engerraund Serac (definitely not on Team Dolores).
Now we know that however this Dolores vs. Serac battle works out, we’ll have another season’s worth of Westworld to enjoy.
Featured image: L-r: Aaron Paul and Evan Rachel Wood in season 3 of ‘Westworld.’ Courtesy HBO
When Matt Reeves’ The Batman began filming this past January 28 in London, we were living in a different world. Reeves’ reboot, starring Robert Pattinson as the Caped Crusader, was slated for a June 25, 2021 release date. The timing was in keeping with all three of Christopher Nolan’s films in his Dark Knight trilogy, which took advantage of the summer blockbuster season to great effect. Batman Begins bowed on June 15, 2005, The Dark Knight on July 18, 2008, and The Dark Knight Rises on July 20, 2012. While no superhero franchise seems better suited for the damp and darkness than Batman, the summer has been very good to DC and Warner Bros.’s most iconic character (no offense, Superman).
Then the spread of COVID-19 shuttered the production (along with just about every other film and TV series that was filming), and the world changed. Only about 25% of the film had been shot by then, and Reeves and his talented cast and crew went home. Since then, Warner Bros. made the decision to move the release date to October 1, 2021, giving The Batman team an extra four months to finish the film.
The delayed release date makes sense on multiple levels for Warner Bros. Sure, in a perfect world, they’d have released the reboot to their most beloved superhero franchise in that sweet summer blockbuster spot. A perfect world this is not, and the extra time means that the cast and crew won’t be rushed—provided they can return to production in the near-ish future—to make a release date that was based on an entertainment world not frozen in place by a global pandemic. Then there’s a more interesting reason why October 1 might actually be a perfect time to release The Batman; it’s proximity to Halloween.
As Screenrant‘s Chrishuan Baker points out, everything we’ve heard thus far about Reeves’ vision for The Batman, as well as the writer/director’s own words, have revolved around the fact that this film would be closer to a noir detective story than your typical superhero blockbuster. Baker writes that the film likely takes at least a little inspiration from the Batman comic book storyline “The Long Halloween,” written by Jeph Loeb and Time Sale. “The Long Halloween” sees Batman, in full sleuthing mode, trying to crack a case in which a serial killer is on the loose in Gotham, beginning his spree on Halloween night and continuing his dasterdly deeds throughout various holidays for the entire year.
Now keep in mind that Reeves’ The Batman is not an adaptation of this storyline. He’s got a full rogue’s gallery of villains to play with—Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman, Paul Dano as the Riddler, and Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot (better known as the Penguin). On his side, there’s Andy Serkis as Alfred, and Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner Gordon. Let’s not also forget Peter Sarsgaard in the mysterious, potentially new role as Gil Colson. Yet even if all Reeves’ is lifting from “The Long Halloween” is Batman in detective mode trying to stop a serial killer, that is more then enough to suggest that October is actually the preferable release date for the film.
Whatever the specific storyline of The Batman ultimately turns out to be, everything we’ve actually seen of the film further suggests October is the perfect month for the release. Think about the screen test of Pattison as Batman that Reeves revealed, set to a snippet of Michael Giacchino’s score. This Batman does not feel like he should be kicking off the start of summer—no, here’s a man that screams Hallow’s Eve.
Then there’s the reveal of the Batmobile. Utterly different from the tank-like creation we got to know in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, this new vehicle, and the moody, red-tinged lighting, further fits our most ghoulish month. And it’s not for nothing that the last time we visited Gotham, the film was released in October and did pretty well for itself. Todd Phillips’ Joker not only made box office records, but Joaquin Phoenix also nabbed an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as Batman’s most iconic villain. (Bruce Wayne’s dad Thomas was a fairly crucial part of the plot, too.)
So fear not, Bat-heads. While we have to wait a while longer to see The Batman, it’s a small price to pay considering the real-life sacrifices being made every day by regular people doing their essential work to keep us fed, safe, and healthy. And what better month to welcome Batman back into our lives than October, a month that rejoices in all things dark and delightful, and that most gleefully surreal of holidays when things go bump in the night.
Featured image: An image from writer/director Matt Reeves ‘The Batman.’ Courtesy Reeves/Warner Bros.
Have you been watching ESPN’s The Last Dance? If so, you’re one of the millions of people who have devoured the first two episodes of their new documentary, which focuses on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and their run for a sixth championship in the 1997/98 season. ESPN has revealed that the first two episodes of the 10-part series averaged 6.1 million viewers. The premiere episodes “rank as the two most-viewed original content broadcasts on ESPN Networks since 2004, surpassing the 2012 filmYou Don’t Know Bo.” The doc is also the most-viewed program on ESPN since the college football National Championship Game (a million years ago).
If you haven’t yet watched the first two episodes, we suggest you lace up your best slippers and check it out. Even if you’re not a sports fan, there’s magic in beholding the maturation of one of the most transformational athletes in history, full stop, in Michael Jordan. Director John Hehir’s documentary would be worth watching if its sole focus was Jordan, but he was surrounded by great players (Scottie Pippen in particular) and real characters, all of whom also make for great doc subjects. The first two episodes are primarily focused on Jordan, but there’s room enough even to focus on the insanely talented and criminally underpaid Pippen, the unpopular but irrefutably successful manager Jerry Krause, the team’s guru-coach Phil Jackson, and the drama and tension that built up within the Chicago Bulls organization during their quest for the sixth championship in eight years.
The Last Dance was originally slated for a June 23 release, but ESPN moved it up to April 19 to account for the fact that most of the country is at home practicing social distancing due to the spread of COVID-19. Two new episodes of the doc series will be released every night through May 17. For international viewers, you can catch The Last Dance on Netflix.
Check out the trailer here:
Here’s the official synopsis:
In the fall of 1997, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls began their quest to win a sixth NBA title in eight years. But despite all Jordan had achieved since his sensational debut 13 years earlier, “The Last Dance,” as coach Phil Jackson called it, would be shadowed by tension with the club’s front office and the overwhelming sense that this was the last time the world would ever see the greatest player of all time, and his extraordinary teammates, in full flight.
Featured image: DETROIT – 1989: Michael Jordan #23 of the Chicago Bulls drives to basket against the Detroit Pistons during the 1989 season NBA game in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)
Sony Pictures has revealed both the official title and a new teaser for Venom 2. Both are delicious if you ask us. The upcoming sequel boasts the formidable, multi-talented Andy Serkis behind the camera, with Tom Hardy, of course, reprising his titular role as the alien symbiote antihero. Also returning for the sequel is Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady, better known as Carnage, an even bigger, badder alien symbiote than Hardy’s Venom. Thus we have our official title—Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
Check out Sony’s reveal of the title and a teaser below:
Let’s take a moment to enjoy this title, which is appropriately bonkers, befitting a film based around one of Marvel’s most marvelously amoral characters. While Eddie Brock’s transformation into Venom was accidental (much like Peter Parker’s into Spider-Man), Brock’s alter ego doesn’t buy into Parker’s “with great power comes great responsibility” ethos. For Venom, with great power comes great hunger, and the ability to eat your enemy’s head without gaining a pound. Brock/Venom also function as a comedy duo, with the former trying to keep the latter from solving every problem with a display of grotesque violence. And to think, Carnage is even more unhinged. Let There Be Carnage sounds like the name to a peak-career Metallica album, which is perfect.
The sequel’s release date is also new. Originally, Serkis, Hardy, Harrelson, and the gang were supposed to appear on October 2, 2020. With the spread of COVID-19, productions have been shut down and premiere dates moved, so we’ll have to wait until next summer, June 25, 2021, to see what Let There Be Carnage has to offer.
It’s official—HBO Max will begin streaming on May 27, 2020. The new platform from Warner Media has revealed its release date and a slew of its upcoming Max Originals, which will all be available on the very first day. These new titles include the intriguing unground ballroom dance competition series Legendary, which includes celebrity judges like Megan Thee Stallion (and looks absolutely terrific.) There’s scripted comedy on the docket in the form of Love Life, an Anna Kendrick-led romantic comedy anthology series. There’s programming that’ll work well for parents, too, including the kids crafting competition show Craftopia, hosted by YouTube hit Laura Riihimaki (known as LaurDIY), and Sesame Workshop’s The Not Too Late Show with Elmo.
HBO Max will feature a whopping 10,000 hours of content, which includes the entire HBO slate of programming, new and classic titles from Warner Bros., New Line, DC, CNN, TNT, TBS, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Looney Tunes and more. And yes, those new Max Originals to boot. It’ll cost $15 a month for most viewers.
“Our number one goal is having extraordinary content for everyone in the family, and the HBO Max programming mix we are so excited to unveil on May 27th will bear that out,” said Robert Greenblatt, Chairman of Warner Media Entertainment and Direct-To-Consumer in a press release. “Even in the midst of this unprecedented pandemic, the all-star teams behind every aspect of HBO Max will deliver a platform and a robust slate of content that is varied, of the highest quality, and second to none. I’m knocked out by the breadth and depth of our new offering, from the Max originals, our Warner Bros library and acquisition titles from around the world, and of course the entirety of HBO.”
Check out a few of the new trailers for the Max Originals here:
Here’s the official synopsis:
Pulling directly from the underground ballroom community, voguing teams (aka “houses”) must compete in unbelievable balls and showcase sickening fashion in order to achieve “legendary” status. The cast includes MC Dashaun Wesley and DJ MikeQ as well as celebrity judges Law Roach, Jameela Jamil, Leiomy Maldonado, and Megan Thee Stallion. From Scout Productions, Emmy Award ® winners David Collins (Queer Eye), Rob Eric (Queer Eye) and Michael Williams (Queer Eye) serve as executive producers. Jane Mun (People’s Choice Awards, MTV Music Awards, America’s Best Dance Crew) and Josh Greenberg (Lip Sync Battle, Sunday Best, America’s Best Dance Crew) serve as executive producers and showrunners.
Craftopia is an epic kids crafting competition show hosted and executive produced by YouTube influencer Lauren Riihimaki aka (LaurDIY). Creating and demonstrating crafts to over 8.9 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, LaurDIY has been deemed the “millennial Martha Stewart” by Forbes. On Craftopia, 9 to 15-year old contestants put their imaginations to the test and make their crafting dreams come true in a magical studio. After racing to fill up their carts with inspiring materials from the studio “store,” crafters meet larger-than-life challenges, making truly inventive and amazing creations in order to take home the Craftrophia.
Love Life, the first full-length scripted series to star Oscar® nominee Anna Kendrick, is about the journey from first love to last love, and how the people we’re with along the way make us into who we are when we finally end up with someone forever. This fresh take on a romantic comedy anthology series is from creator and co-showrunner Sam Boyd (In a Relationship) and is produced by Lionsgate Television and Feigco Entertainment. The series will follow a different protagonist’s quest for love each season, with each half-hour episode telling the story of one of their relationships. Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect, A Simple Favor) stars in the first season along with Zoë Chao (Downhill, Strangers), Peter Vack (Someone Great, The Bold Type), Sasha Compere (Miracle Workers, Uncorked), and Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread, Another Year).
Kendrick serves as an executive producer alongside Paul Feig (A Simple Favor, Bridesmaids) and Dan Magnante (Someone Great). Sam Boyd, who wrote the pilot and directs, also executive produces with co-showrunner and executive producer Bridget Bedard (Transparent and Ramy).
Tales from the Loop, Amazon’s latest sci-fi offering which stars Rebecca Hall and Jonathan Pryce, resists easy definition. Set in Ohio but based on paintings of Sweden, the residents of the small town at the center of the series are all loosely bound by a machine known as the Loop, a technology intended to unlock the universe’s mysteries and the town’s main employer. Thanks to decades in business and the abandonment of various detritus—robots and body-switching contraptions left in the woods, a little gizmo that freezes time dropped in a lake—the Loop has an outsize effect on its neighbors, though they take these disruptions to their otherwise low-fi lives in stride. Living near the Loop, you may meet yourself as a child or accidentally freeze the rest of the town until you’re inclined to flip the switch, but these abnormalities never outpace primary concerns like love, family, or regret.
Part of what makes the show unique, points out visual effects producer Andrea Knoll, is that that this “is probably the first series to be based on paintings.” Tales from the Loop closely hews to its source material, the work of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. Stålenhag is known for his depictions of a bucolic Sweden, punctuated by robots and cooling towers and other representations of the technological world, looking unexpectedly at home in their rural settings. To convert these works to narrative television without losing their pastoral quality necessitated a particular restrained approach to the show’s visual effects. For Knoll, whose credits include Stranger Things, there was little similarity between that small-town sci-fi world and this one.
Key art of the towers from ‘Tales From The Loop.’ Courtesy Amazon Studios
“We were always trying, on Tales from the Loop, to achieve as much as we could emotionally with the work, and having that be done subtly,” she explained. “There’s so much you can do now with visual effects and with CG, and we were always working really hard to stay away from that.” A showdown between a melancholy bipedal robot and his aggressor is slow-paced and ungainly—about as far from a Transformers reference as fighting robots can get.
The show’s restrained take on sci-fi can leave a viewer wondering what’s what in terms of practical and visual effects. “When I first saw the scripts, I thought most of the work would be CG, and then it turns out that everyone wanted to try to accomplish as much, practically, as we could,” said Knoll. Her team’s goal was to achieve a photorealistic, seamless result between full CG, enhancements and set extensions. For example, take that lonesome blue robot in the woods: seen in close-ups or inactive, “that work is practical and in visual effects, we would just do a paint-out. The puppeteers really executed the right emotions for those scenes,” Knoll explained. “Anytime we have to take it further, by doing anything dynamic, if the robot is running, walking through the woods, that’s full CGI animation.” For viewers, though, at the forefront is the robot’s tragic arc, not the technology that brought him to the screen.
As Tales from the Loop shifts its focus between storylines, so go the series’ visual effects. Whereas some episodes are concerned with the plight of a marooned robot, the biggest sci-fi aspects at other moments are ancillary details, like a small swirling sinkhole in a field or the airwaves generated by a hovering tractor, right before it slips into a concurrent alternate reality. Either way, the show stays tightly visually true to Stålenhag’s source material. “We made models and painted texture on all these things to match Simon’s work, but then it was really about making sure each image, each frame that we’d see on screen, feels like a painting,” said Knoll. Prioritizing the human element was intentional, with the VFX team working “to keep the visual effects more subtle, so that it wasn’t overtaking any element of the emotion of the scene or of the story,” said Knoll.
Key art of the towers from ‘Tales From The Loop.’ Courtesy Amazon Studios
Sometimes this was as much about taking elements out as it was enhancing them. The show’s third episode tries to answer the question of how things might work out if lovers could stop time. Green screen posts made it easy for the actors to do their job: remain frozen for most of the 40-minute episode, after high school student May (Nicole Law), revives a lost contraption that freezes everyone and everything in town, besides her and her new boyfriend. With the episode shot on location, nature was a trickier collaborator. “That ended up becoming one of the more challenging episodes because we’d have to go in and interrogate each frame,” said Knoll. “We’d look at nature elements in post-production and editing, and we’d count movement of the trees or the shadows.”And in this quiet sci-fi drama, attention to trees and shadows is as key to the story as robot movements and futuristic architecture—without the two working in tandem, the wonder of Stålenhag’s paintings would have been lost.
Tales From The Loop is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Featured image: One Sheet – Ecosphere, from ‘Tales From The Loop.’ Courtesy Amazon Studios.
Before No Time To Die co-writer and director Cary Joji Fukunaga had settled on which direction he was taking Daniel Craig in his last turn as James Bond, he had pitched a truly wild idea. Fukunaga revealed this to fellow filmmaker Miranda July in Interview Magazinelong before No Time To Die was pushed back from its original April 2020 release date to this November, due to the spread of COVID-19. This pitch was ultimately deemed to be “too out there” by the film’s producers, but its fascinating to hear about it now and imagine what could have been.
Some context before we delve into Fukunaga’s wild pitch; in No Time To Die, Bond’s Caribbean retirement is interrupted and he’s pressed back into duty once more. This time, the main villain is Rami Malek’s Safin, but we know that Bond’s nemesis from Spectre, Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) has a role to play here. Another Spectre alum, Dr. Madeline Swann (Lea Seydoux) returns as well. In Spectre, it looked as if Blofeld had gotten the better of Bond, and was set to erase his memory and all that Bond had fought for—and everyone he’d lost along the way.
Fukunaga revealed to July in Interview that his original pitch was that his Bond film would exist entirely in the super spy’s head. The whole film, all playing out in the tortured mind of Her Majesty’s most lethal double O agent? Yeah, that does sound out there, but also potentially incredible. Here’s how Funkaga described it to July:
“Miranda, I swear to god, I had an idea that this movie could all be taking place inside the villain’s lair from the last film. There’s this scene where a needle goes into James Bond’s head, which is supposed to make him forget everything, and then he miraculously escapes by a watch bomb. And then he and Léa blow up the place and go on to save the day. I was like, ‘What if everything up until the end of act two is all inside his head?’”
Fukunaga and his writing team (including Phoebe Waller-Bridge, no less) ultimately didn’t pursue this cerebral path. We do know that the story they did resulted in the longest Bond film of all time, at 2 hours and 43 minutes.
Here’s what we know of the actual film Fukunaga and his team have made. Bond begins No Time To Die in retirement in Jamaica. It’s been five years since the events in Spectre, and MI6’s legendary super spy has been nursing his wounds. “After five years of retirement, who has he become?” Fukanaga asked in a recent No Time To Die teaser. “He’s sort of a wounded animal struggling with his role as a double O. The world’s changed, the rules of engagement aren’t what they used to be. The rules of espionage are darker in this era of asymmetric warfare.“
Of course, Bond won’t stay retired for long. Once CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) shows up, Bond will be pushed back into action once again. And with this amount of runtime to work with, he’ll have plenty of time to see old friends like Madeleine Swann (Seydoux), old enemies like Blofeld (Waltz), meet new allies like Nomi (Lashana Lynch), and finally, deal with new threats. Specifically, Safin (Malek), who, according to Fukanaga, will be challenging Bond and threatening everyone and everything he holds dear.
At this point, we’ll just be thrilled whenever we find ourselves back in a theater watching Craig’s last go-round as Bond. For now, No Time To Die is slated for a November 25, 2020 release.
Ryan Murphy taking on Hollywood in the glamorous (and often odious) period after World War II? Yeah, that sounds like a series we could get into. Netflix has revealed the first trailer for Murphy’s glam, grand, intriguing new series, which takes on Hollywood’s Golden Age by following a slew of up-and-coming actors and filmmakers as they attempt to succeed in a town that crushes dreams as quickly as it makes them.
What makes Murphy’s Hollywood fascinating is that it’s not just a glitzy look at what Hollywood was like when the dinosaurs of the industry were in total, unquestioned control. Instead, the limited series will examine what Hollywood might have been like if those old power structures that kept women down and minorities largely invisible had been dismantled from the inside. The characters that Murphy has focused on were all bullied and menaced, in ways overt and subtle, by the old Hollywood system. But what if an African American actress had, instead of being shunted off to a tiny role, instead become a leading lady in roles commensurate with her talent? What if the legendary actor Rock Hudson (played by Jake Picking) had been allowed to be openly gay and keep his career?
This is an intriguing premise, and there are few TV creators as ambitious or as successful as Murphy. The cast is large and excellent, as it always is in a Murphy series, and includes Darren Criss, Laura Harrier, Patti LuPone, Dylan McDermott and more.
Check out the Hollywood trailer below.
Here’s the official synopsis:
A new limited series from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, HOLLYWOOD follows a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers in post-World War II Hollywood as they try to make it in Tinseltown — no matter the cost. Each character offers a unique glimpse behind the gilded curtain of Hollywood’s Golden Age, spotlighting the unfair systems and biases across race, gender and sexuality that continue to this day. Provocative and incisive, HOLLYWOOD exposes and examines decades-old power dynamics, and what the entertainment landscape might look like if they had been dismantled.
HOLLYWOOD stars David Corenswet as Jack, Darren Criss as Raymond, Jeremy Pope as Archie, Laura Harrier as Camille, Samara Weaving as Claire, Dylan McDermott as Ernie, Holland Taylor as Ellen Kincaid, Patti LuPone as Avis, Jim Parsons as Henry Willson, Jake Picking as Rock Hudson, Joe Mantello as Dick, and Maude Apatow as Henrietta. The series is Executive Produced by Co-Creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, along with Alexis Martin Woodall and Janet Mock, who also serves as a writer and a director.
Featured image: Michelle Krusiec and Laura Harrier in Hollywood. Photo by SAEED ADYANI/NETFLIX.
Cinematographer Priyanka Singh jumped on the phone from Mumbai more or less exactly at the moment that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was locking down the country—and its’ 1.3 billion residents—on March 24. “Right at this very minute, our Prime Minister is addressing the nation and saying, ‘It’ll go on for three weeks,'” Singh said. “There’s a country-wide lockdown for the next three weeks. This means a curfew, a state of emergency. We just have to figure out what to do in the next three weeks. We need to get a little creative, a bit more innovative, and figure things out. This is unprecedented.”
As we’ve all learned in the era of COVID-19, everything, from time itself to the decrees issued by our leaders, is fluid. Many of us are more or less frozen in place, yet things are changing rapidly and all the time. That three weeks that Prime Minister Modi has been extended until at least May 3. For Singh, one of the most talented cinematographers working in India, that means more time to consider her most recent documentary, which under ordinary circumstances would be top of mind.
The documentary, titled Kicking Balls, is about a soccer program in rural India for young girls, where the practice of child marriage, although illegal in the country, still takes place.
“When it started, it was a very tiny idea, which came about because our director, Vijayeta Kumar, had come across this nonprofit organization, Mahila Jans Adhikar Samiti (MJAS), that works out of Rajasthan,” Singh says. “They started this football training camp for girls from remote areas, places that haven’t seen a lot of development. One of the vices these villages still suffer from is child marriage, which is illegal, but still happens due to social and economic pressure. They’ve been continuing to do this under the guise of maintaining culture. So MJAS had started this football camp for girls in an effort to help make them independent, to give them some idea of freedom, to open their mind to other possibilities in life. Because when they’re married off, they don’t understand anything that’s happening to them.”
Cinematographer Priyanka Singh on the set of ‘Kicking Balls.’ Courtesy Priyanka Singh.
Like the nonprofit itself, Singh and her crew had to figure out how to work within this cloistered local community. The goals of the documentary were in line with the nonprofit; how do we empower these girls without making ourselves instantly odious to the rest of the members of the community? Filming in a cloistered, rural community sets up a series of challenges, cultural and logistical. Doing so when the film you’re aiming to make is touching upon a taboo subject that is kept secret increases those challenges tenfold.
“There are a lot of challenges about this documentary because child marriage is not supposed to come out in the open,” Singh says. “People are really guarded about it. It’s really challenging to be able to shoot in these villages without hostility. Any little mistake can tip things over. But we succeeded in getting more depth than we’d originally thought we might, and getting some people to actually come on camera, including the grooms.”
Once Singh and the crew began filming, she said it was like opening Pandora’s box. “There were so many girls and so many stories,” she said. “Listening to these girls about why they got married or how they’ve been engaged, and seeing their performance on the field and the possibilities that they have, we just realized the film had to cover a much wider scope of their lives. So we started expanding on it, and we went back to shoot what their actual lives in their villages are like, what kind of families they come from, how is it these marriages are still going on, what’s the logic people use to defend child marriage? It now has so many layers.”
Cinematographer Prinyanka Singh and the crew in rural India, on the set of ‘Kicking Balls.’ Courtesy Priyanka Singh.
Singh’s experience wasn’t all that different from her previous documentary work. You go into a new film thinking you’ve got a decent understanding of your subject, and you get to work and find out how little you actually know.
“Reaching out to these areas and finding out what these peoples’ lives are actually like, it’s an entirely different experience,” she says. “I love shooting documentaries. I’ve done a lot of work in both fiction and non-fiction, and this is one of the most challenging films I’ve ever done. Not just challenging, but at the same time, bringing out something you think doesn’t exist because it’s not supposed to, because it’s illegal. So many things that we take for granted are a privilege for somebody else. That’s what this documentary is about, it’s about the future these girls can have. The dreams that they do have. Most of them are very ambitious, but then their dreams can get killed by decisions made by grownups who think they know better.”
Working on the doc gave Singh a chance to hear from people actually defending the practice of child marriage, which then made her think about the privilege of being able to make your own decisions about your life. “The conditioning is so deep-rooted, they’re not able to realize it,” she says. “This is done in the name of culture, in the name of tradition, and all these tools are used to maintain the status quo. When you listen to people who speak in favor of it, you think about the things we take for granted, like the privilege of being able to make a decision about your life, on your own. The decisions are made by society, by your socioeconomic position, and, most of the time, these decisions are made by men. And all these things are something you cannot change overnight. You can’t just get rid of patriarchy in a year.”
Yet Singh still found reasons to hope. The fact that the nonprofit, MJAS, was able to operate in the region and get these villagers to allow the girls to play was remarkable.
“Sports in India, in general, are not really possible for girls. Even in the city, you’d hardly ever see girls playing football,” she says. “Even the one sport which is very famous here, cricket, is not even considered a lucrative career option for women. So to tell people in the village that your girls should come to this football camp, from villages that are hugely patriarchal, is amazing. Everything in these girls’ lives is dictated; how they should dress, how they should behave, who they should marry, all because the elders say they should. So for the nonprofit to convince these girls to come out and play football in shorts, it’s like a breath of fresh air. I could see it in the girls when we filmed them in the camp, versus when we filmed them back in their villages. They were so different. This exposure has given them a sense of freedom.”
Kicking Balls is currently in post-production and will be completed once the spread of COVID-19 is deemed under control by the Indian government.
Featured image: Cinematographer Priyanka Singh on the set of ‘Kicking Balls.’ Courtesy Priyanka Singh.
Maria Schrader is best known for her award-winning acting roles — she starred in the acclaimed wartime romance Aimee and Jaguar (1999) and plays Stasi agent Lenora Rauch in the spy thriller Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86 now on Hulu — but she’s also an esteemed director. In both her exquisite biopic about the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (2016) and, now, as director of all four episodes of the hit Netflix series Unorthodox, Schrader creates intimacy and authenticity with meticulous period detail, galvanizing performances and atmospheric layering of past and present.
“You have to create a world,” says the Berlin-based Schrader in a telephone interview from Germany. For Unorthodox, that world is the insulated Hasidic Satmar community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The first episode begins with 19-year-old Esty (Shira Hass) secretly fleeing the sect and her arranged marriage to the meek but controlling Yanky (Amit Rahav). She lands in multicultural, bustling Berlin, where she plans to reconnect with her mother who also escaped the religious community when Esty was a child.
Even though it’s set largely in the present, Unorthodox had to be constructed as a period film with detailed Hasidic customs and rituals from the costumes to the Yiddish dialogue to a lavish wedding scene.
“The whole wedding sequence was shot in two days. We prepared a lot. If you are tight with time and budget, you have to work hard and prepare well,” says Schrader. “Everything under the chuppah was rehearsed, like the theater.” More than 200 extras were hired for the scene. “Some of them were just Berlin people who’d never had contact with Judaism. Some men were cast just for their beards. With two hundred extras, we did not have the ability to put beards on everyone.”
L-r: Amit Rahav is Yanky Shapiro and Shira Haas is Esher Shapiro. Photo by Anika Molnar/Netflix
This international flavor and spirit infused the entire production, which is just what Schrader wanted. “It was incredible; we aroused interest — [the extras] learned the songs, they learned to dance, they learned many rituals and [there was] such a mixture of tenderness and curiosity and communication with each other,” she says. “I enjoyed this already with Stefan Zweig because we had people speaking seven different languages. It brings out the best.”
L-r: Amit Rahav is Yanky Shapiro and Shira Haas is Esher Shapiro. Photo by Anika Molnar/Netflix
Specific human stories that expand into universal themes have marked Schrader’s work ever since her directorial debut Love Life, based on Zeruya Shalev’s novel, which she shot in Israel and Africa in 2007. She’s drawn to projects, whether acting or directing, that invite her to “discover more and more,” she says.
“It’s like playing Medea onstage; I played Medea for almost 10 years [and] every time, you discover — the roof is so high. A film like Unorthodox touches so many themes.”
Inspired by Deborah Feldman’s bestselling 2012 memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, the all-women creative team includes Berlin-based American writer-producer Anna Winger (who wrote Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86) and Alexa Karolinski. Winger approached Schrader about directing early in the process of developing the series.
“We got to know each other during Deutschland. Since I am also a writer, familiar with other parts of filmmaking, we started to have meta conversations and discovered a similar outlook, shared tastes [in] how to approach stories, almost like a philosophy,” Schrader says. “She saw Stefan Zweig and said, ‘we must work together.’ The moment Netflix gave us the green light, they told us when to deliver and it was more or less in a year.”
L-r: Shira Haas, Maria Schrader, and Amit Rahav. Photo by Anika Molnar/Netflix
Schrader worked closely with the writers in drafting the show’s scripts. “I was in the discussions; not co-writing but giving ideas, talking about dramaturgy, the parallel lines of narrative and how to combine, what to focus on,” she says. “There was constant talk, which was important for me because it was the first time I was directing something that I had not personally written.”
Despite her success as a director, Schrader plans to continue acting.
“I love acting so I’m not dependent on making a living as a director,” she says. It was while she was appearing as Martha in a production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Hamburg, Germany that production began on Unorthodox.
“Opening night was January 19. I flew to New York, then we started shooting [in Berlin]. I had five or six performances [of the play] to go. I’d drive to Berlin to be on the set at 6 a.m. Every time I thought, I have to go on stage and I’m so tired. But when you are onstage, for those two hours, it puts you in the here and now like nothing else. Then you come offstage and you see all the messages again and must prepare for the next day. But it’s empowering to have that moment and concentrate on something different. Every time, I was happy; I was less exhausted.”
L-r: Shira Haas and Felix Mayr in ‘Unorthodox.’ Photo by Anika Molnar/Netflix
Coming from the art house film world where small indies struggle for attention and audiences, Schrader marvels at Netflix’s instant global reach. “For a long time, it really felt like we were this small, German production under the radar. We had a small budget, [it was] all in Yiddish, and we are next to these big, ocean cruisers of series. But at the end of the day, we are all like products in a store side by side on the same shelf,” she says. “I realized how in an instant [it creates] buzz in many countries and then suddenly everyone is watching. This is actually the most incredible thing — that women wearing burkas are seeing [Unorthodox] in Arabic countries. It is amazing.”
Featured image: Director Maria Schrader on the sets of Unorthodox. Courtesy Netflix.
Amazon Studios has premiered writer/director Tayarisha Poe’s new indie Selah and the Spades to near-universal acclaim. It’s the story that takes place in an elite boarding school, where seventeen-year-old senior, Selah Summers (Lovie Simone), runs the Spades, a powerful clique that supplies illegal drugs to the student body. That’s just one of the vices these cliques, or ‘factions,’ offer, which also includes gambling and illegal parties. When her right-hand-man Maxxie (Jharrel Jerome) gets distracted, Selah takes on the new kid, sophomore Paloma (Celeste O’Connor) as a protégé, in the hopes of ultimately transferring the power of ruling the school to her. It’s a messy world full of complicated relationships, paranoia, manipulations, and risk. The film may seem an extremely amplified version of teenage life, but nearly every scene has something that will resonate with those who are currently living or have lived through the tortures of high school.
L-r: Celeste O’Connor, Lovie Simone and Jharrel Jerome star in SELAH AND THE SPADES Photo: Courtesy of Amazon Studios.
Celeste O’Connor, who plays the ingénue Selah takes under her wing, spoke to The Credits about her experience playing Paloma. One thing she and the character have in common is they both learn from observing. The actress explains, “I’m more extroverted and more experiential than Paloma is, but we are definitely both observers. I think Paloma being able to take a step back to see how Selah is operating, to observe her relationship with Maxxie and how things work in their world, is such an important part of how she learns and grows. She begins to pick up on how Selah does things, and on her confidence. A lot of her growth comes from that.” Her character also has a connection to the audience, and that allows viewers to learn through her as well. “I think it’s really interesting for the audience having Paloma as their eyes and ears. When she experiences something for the first time, the audience is also experiencing it for the first time.”
Writer/director Tayarisha Poe guided the cast in building personal histories for their characters, in part by supplying short stories to each actor with background information. When it came to rehearsals, Poe put the three leads together, letting them explore the school and other locations.
“Our rehearsals were about getting to know each other as people, creating friendships that were real, but that could also translate really well onscreen. Just spending time with Lovie and Jharrel ended up working perfectly. You can see the chemistry onscreen between Paloma and Selah. It was real, in part, because we had become such close friends by the time we were filming.”
(L-R) Lovie Simone and Jharrel Jerome star in SELAH AND THE SPADES Photo: Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Poe also gave O’Connor a really helpful personal assignment. “Tayarisha had me create a playlist for Paloma, so I went through the major events and the turning points that happened for her in the script, and I assigned songs for each of those important moments in the story. That helped me process the emotions of what was going on in each scene, because I understand and process emotion a lot through music.”
O’Connor feels portrayals of complicated characters of color onscreen are essential, allowing a more diverse audience to feel seen, and a wider audience to gain understanding. “The fact that the characters are neither wholly good or bad is something that was really intentional and important to Tayarisha. We bring different perspectives and different ideas that maybe people of other backgrounds and experiences might not have thought of. She really wanted a story that was not necessarily explicitly about race. She wanted to show black kids just being kids, not being punished or criminalized for it, but showing black kids as full human beings that have their own motivations you may or may not agree with. I think that’s really important because a lot of times you see people of color shown as stereotypes or caricatures, far from the reality of how multi-faceted people of color are.”
There is a power play between the characters, but also there is power in the fact that two young women of color are portraying complicated leads, guided by a female filmmaker of color. O’Connor found that exhilarating, and speaks to how inspirational she found it as both an actress, and a citizen of the world. “In terms of Paloma, a lot of the story is her figuring out her own power and her own confidence. Early on, she derives a lot of her power and confidence from the fact that she was chosen by Selah, and I think that Selah takes advantage of that.” She continues, “On a larger scale, it’s so important to have women of color in positions of power and in leadership positions. It was really impactful to work with a black female director.”
Celeste O’Connor finished the interview by talking about what she learned and how she changed through working on the film. “I got to experience being on-set with all these young black creatives. I personally grew up in an all-white neighborhood and went to an all-white school. This is really the first time that I was among people that looked like me. People who were incredibly talented and driven. For me to have that experience, when I was coming right out of high school, was the catalyst for my own personal growth, and my development in terms of confidence, and being proud of my identity. Not only was it a really great opportunity professionally, but personally it had a huge impact on who I am. I know it doesn’t happen with every project, but it makes Selah and the Spades really special to me.”
Selah and the Spades is streaming now on Amazon Prime.
Featured image: Celeste O’Connor stars in SELAH AND THE SPADES. Photo: Courtesy of Amazon Studios
